Naturally, Cullen enjoyed filling those Treasury coffers with the extra billions of revenue, and tax from these power companies, to fund Liarbour spending.

Bernard Hickey also covers the matter here, noting the government is also conducting a Ministerial Review into the energy sector.

I have long queried the set up of the energy sector here, part private, part-state-owned as a unhappy halfway house.

Either we have a state-owned monoply or we have a wholly private and competitive market. Though there is obviously room for debate on that matter.

However, I fully concur with Hickey's recommendations:

The government needs to bear down on the market to reduce prices and control inflation. How it does this is another kettle of fish. It needs to ignore its own desire for super profits from the SOEs.New Zealand needs a more efficient market delivering lower prices.

Bradfords 'reforms' were the biggest dog's breakfast foisted on the NZ consumer. All they did was allow the lines companies to screw the power companies who in their turn screwed us-leaving Trainspotter Cullen to shaft everybody.

Two thing that I haven't seen anyone mention today are the RMA and the cost of the so-called sustainable energy (i.e. fighting the mythical beast of climate change). What I want to know is, how much of this $4.3 billion has gone into profits which is not so bad (as we can quite easily get it back in the future) or higher costs of production/waste which is much worse?

The Liabour trolls are trying to place the blame on Bradford. If his reforms were so bad then it should have been the first item on Clark's agenda (ahead of social engineering and sexual re-classification}. Instead we had the financial fool forcing the price up to the degree that industrial production plummeted.